


warmth

by cougarlips



Series: fanille week 2018 [3]
Category: Final Fantasy XIII
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Introspection, POV Third Person, Post-Lightning Returns, new world fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-05 00:21:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14605014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cougarlips/pseuds/cougarlips
Summary: Encased in crystal for so many years, unable to interact with the world around her, a part of her almost thought she’d forgotten what it felt like to be so warm.





	warmth

**Author's Note:**

> day 3: change or **warmth**

Vanille sat under the sunlight and basked in its heat, her mind clearer than it had been in a long time.

Encased in crystal for so many years, unable to interact with the world around her, a part of her almost thought she’d forgotten what it felt like to be so _warm_.

It hadn’t been her fault – not entirely. On Gran Pulse she lived under the sun, thriving in the warmth and spending more time than not outside, much to the displeasure of her elders. But Vanille couldn’t help the way she longed for the smell of the earth or the way the grass felt beneath her toes.

And then she found herself entombed, and while it wasn’t necessarily _cold_ inside the crystal, it wasn’t warm, either. It was lonely. Year after year passing but then all blending into another, time itself ceasing to exist until she simply stopped registering the passage of it.

She had only a few short weeks of blissful companionship. A rough and rocky companionship, sure, but for Vanille, who longed for warmth and physical affection it was bliss. Crystallization came soon after it, but even this time it wasn’t so bad, for this time her tomb was linked for an eternity with Fang, her partner, the love of her life.

Her crystal tomb was different that time. She was painfully aware of the world around her: Lightning’s disappearance, the unstable chaos forming through each generation’s Yeul, Caius and his desperate fight to end the chaos and ultimately encasing the world in it. Serah’s demise. Hope, Noel, and Snow uniting through their pains to make the world a safe place once more, only to fail.

But then they woke up – Vanille to the cries of the dead and the damned, and Fang to a beast she couldn’t slay. It nearly broke them. It _did_ break them. Vanille tried to drown herself in Fang, tried to let Fang kiss her sorrows away, but it never lasted. Even with Fang at her side, Vanille never felt lonelier or colder than when she walked the streets of Luxerion in the dead of night.

At least, that’s what she thought before Fang left her for the dunes, and she was forced to remain inside the Cathedral’s walls.

She almost couldn’t imagine, in the New World, ever feeling that sort of chilly desolation ever again. It felt foreign to her, like it happened in a previous life – which, she supposed, it had.


End file.
